Aisha Ali-Gombe

Zhiyong Sui, Lamine Noureddine, Mst Eshita Khatun et al.

Sandboxing remains a core technique for observing suspicious program behavior, yet environment-aware malware increasingly suppresses execution when analysis is suspected. Prior generations of sandbox evasion focused on virtualization artifacts, timing discrepancies, and wear-and-tear realism. In this paper, we present the first systematic measurement study of AI-environment artifacts as a new sandbox-evasion surface. We operationalize this realism gap through AIprint, a probe framework that captures persistent artifacts left behind by AI-capable software ecosystems, including AI-assistant configuration directories, model caches, environment variables, local inference services, and package dependencies. We systematically extract 450 unique artifacts from 284 open-source AI projects on GitHub, compile them into unprivileged Windows probes, and evaluate them across seven commercial and open-source sandbox backends together with three AI-capable reference hosts. Our results show that traditional VM-detection baselines fail to reliably distinguish real AI-capable systems from modern sandboxes, whereas twelve AI-environment artifacts appear on the reference hosts and on none of the evaluated backends. A controlled 214-step installation experiment establishes a causal relationship between AI tool and package installation and measurable AI-environment artifact accumulation, while adaptive spoofing experiments reveal a fundamental operational asymmetry: reproducing convincing AI software environments is substantially more expensive than detecting shallow spoofing.

Mst Eshita Khatun, Lamine Noureddine, Sideeq Bello et al.

With the rapid growth of mobile applications, user data privacy has become an increasing concern. While privacy policies describe how apps collect and share data, platforms such as Google Play provide Data Safety labels intended to summarize these practices. Because these disclosure channels are declared separately, they may present inconsistent representations of app data practices, creating uncertainty for users and regulators. In this work, we conducted a large-scale empirical study of disclosure consistency across 6,051 Android apps. Using an LLM-based extraction framework and a unified schema over 14 Google Play data categories and two operations (collection and sharing), we measure per-app and per-category consistency and introduce a sensitivity-weighted risk score that emphasizes high-risk data types. We find that misalignment disproportionately affects sensitive categories such as personal information and device identifiers, with sharing disclosures exhibiting lower consistency than collection disclosures. Elevated privac risk is concentrated in app categories associated with persistent monitoring and communication. Overall, our findings highlight structural gaps in current disclosure mechanisms and underscore the need for stronger verification and greater transparency in platform-level privacy reporting.

Zhiyong Sui, Lamine Noureddine, Mst Eshita Khatun et al.

Sandbox evasion remains a critical challenge for automated malware analysis, as modern malware employs environment checks to detect analysis platforms and suppress malicious behavior. Existing approaches rely on manually crafted bypass rules that require deep reverse engineering of each evasion mechanism -an approach that cannot scale against rapidly evolving evasion techniques. In this paper, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate YARA rules that bypass evasion checks in sandbox environments. We propose ABLE, which analyzes execution traces from malware terminated due to potentially evasive behavior and employs multiple reasoning strategies to generate targeted bypass rules. To address syntactic errors and improve the efficacy of the bypass rules in the LLM outputs, we introduce an auto-sanitization pipeline and feedback-driven iterative refinement. We evaluate ABLE on 334 real-world malware samples across four open-weight LLMs. ABLE achieves a 79% bypass success rate, with iterative refinement contributing 29.5% of successful cases. Compared to existing analysis platforms, ABLE identifies 47% more malware family classifications and exposes previously hidden behaviors.